American Council for Judaism

The American Council for Judaism (ACJ) is an organization of American Jews committed to the proposition that Jews are not a nationality but merely a religious group, adhering to the original stated principles of Reform Judaism, as articulated in the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform.

The ACJ was founded in June 1942 by a group of Reform rabbis who opposed the direction of their movement, including, but not limited to, the issue of Zionism as redefined by the Biltmore Program in May 1942. After the Reform movement declared itself officially neutral on Zionism in 1937, the split was prompted by the passage of a resolution endorsing the raising of a "Jewish army" in Palestine to fight alongside the Allies of World War II. The leading rabbis included Louis Wolsey, Morris Lazaron, Abraham Cronbach, David Philipson, and Henry Cohen but their most vocal representative soon became Elmer Berger, who became the Council's Executive Director.

The presidency of the ACJ was accepted by the well-known philanthropist Lessing J. Rosenwald, who took the lead in urging the creation of a unitary democratic state in the British Mandate of Palestine in American policy-making circles. Though up against overwhelming support for the creation of a Jewish state in Congress, the Council had many friends who supported its position in the State Department such as Sumner Welles and Dean Acheson. In the final year before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the Council became very close to Judah Magnes, the leading Israeli advocate for a binational state, who had returned to America for fear of his life in Palestine.

Though Louis Wolsey resigned from the Council after the founding of the State of Israel, the ACJ persevered, believing that its primary foe was the influence...